[hackerlight]

It isn't a conspiracy. Conspiracy implies planning and plotting. That was just decentralized media figures deciding to copy each other's opinions, because there's safety in numbers and group think, and because dissent sticks out and gets attacked.

[yonaguska]

If you still think we have decentralized media figures simply copying each other...when all your media companies air the same advertisements from the same pharmaceutical companies, it's no surprise that they would all take the same opinions. Speaking for American media only. They might not be conspiring with each other, but they are certainly are taking orders from the same places.

This doesn't cover the other news epidemic we have of state intel actors propping up media conglomerates as a matter of foreign policy. Specifically in Ukraine, and I'm only referencing this as it's probably the most recent example- the US is currently offering grants to organizations in Ukraine right now [0], this actually doesn't seem very nefarious. It's been going on for quite some time however. This article [1] goes into details about various factchecking organizations that worked in Ukraine to promote and minimalize the extreme sides of far right orgs in Ukraine since before the Russian invasion. StopFake is specifically called out, an organization that was previously hosted by our very own spokeswoman for the now defunct Ministry of Truth, Nina Jankowicz. And we know Taiwan does it, via Epoch Times, Russia does it with Russia Times, and various other state actors use more sophisticated methods. Before I dropped off most social media, it was obvious seeing Chinese propaganda being pushed, oftentimes through New York Times opinion pieces. Israel and China are probably two of the more sophisticated state actors, up there with the US intel agencies.

tldr: nothing is real, most media is carefully curated to shape your opinions and culture, not to inform you.

[0] https://ua.usembassy.gov/education-culture/media-development... [1] https://mronline.org/2022/08/08/most-of-the-fact-checking-or...

[hackerlight]

> They might not be conspiring with each other, but they are certainly are taking orders from the same places.

I don't see enough evidence for this claim.

The simpler explanation is that they're lazy (as most humans are) and scared to dissent (as most humans are), therefore they don't bother doing original work that challenges the accepted wisdom and they copy each other.

I do have some evidence for this. Within hours of the Amber Heard judgement came down, identical false claims about the judgement were blasted across all major news sites. I am rather confident that there was no nefarious plot here, because the stakes were so low and didn't involve powerful actors, and because non-US news outlets parroted the same fake news. Is there some secret clandestine organization doing this, coordinating with US and non-US news sources, on a story of no political significance? I saw the fake news get manufactured in front of my eyes. What happened was there was a viral tweet that created the fake claim, then one journalist picked up on it, and then all the other journalists copied that one journalist, because that's lower effort and safer than doing a thorough job.

Occam's razor + hanlon's razor.

> This article [1] goes into details about various factchecking organizations that worked in Ukraine to promote and minimalize the extreme sides of far right orgs in Ukraine since before the Russian invasion.

Lol, very few people are minimizing Azov or other far-right groups in Ukraine. Everyone knows they're a huge problem (albeit they are a problem that is caused by Russia's invasion in 2014 - Ukraine, being much smaller, doesn't have the luxury of picking and choosing who is allowed to fight, given the imminent threat of further invasion from a larger neighbor). They are mostly just countering the Kremlin's propaganda that Ukraine is run by drug-addicted banderites and that Azov, a fairly small unit, is representative of the entire military and political leadership. The Russian propaganda around this was insane, helped along by treacherous US crypto fascists, and so hypocritical given that neo-Nazi views are more widely subscribed inside Russia than in Ukraine according to Pew polling, and given that the head of Wagner (whom Putin has shaken hands with) is an open neo-nazi with SS tattoos on his neck, and given that Pushilin has been seen awarding a medal to an open neo-nazi, and given that Putin himself is a literal fascist compared to the democratically elected Zelenskyy.

[yonaguska]

> Lol, very few people are minimizing Azov or other far-right groups in Ukraine. Everyone knows they're a huge problem

Your response to the USA spearheading propaganda efforts to support far right neo-nazi's is- 1) they failed and 2) russian nazi's are worse.

My problem is with the fact that the US did it at all, whether we agree or disagree on the success of that operation isn't part of my point.

As for media being driven by conspiring forces, I agree that they are lazy and scared to dissent, but this doesn't account for everything. I'm not going to take the time to prove that right now. If you truly believe the media organizations are benign, just lazy and conformists, then I doubt I can change your mind anyways.

> albeit they are a problem that is caused by Russia's invasion in 2014

Unrelated, they were an organization that existed long before Russia's invasion, and they arguably played a crucial role in ensuring that the peaceful Euromaiden protests turned bloody. This goes back to CIA Operation ANYFACE, and subsequent Western intervention during the Cold War and after the fall of the USSR to combat Russian influence.

https://www.voltairenet.org/article216406.html https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/operation-anyface-how...

[hackerlight]

> Your response to the USA spearheading propaganda efforts to support far right neo-nazi's is- 1) they failed and 2) russian nazi's are worse.

No, my response is that (1) it's an insane unsupported conspiracy theory, (2) which misdirects from the actual fascist dictatorship that uses gaslighting and DARVO to trick conspiracy minded fools into thinking that actually the democratically elected centrists over in Ukraine are the real fascists.

Consider this. STOPFAKE, an alleged arm of US pro-fascist propaganda, whitewashes C14 by calling it a "community organization", yet the U.S. State Department classifies C14 as a "nationalist hate group". Why would the U.S. State Department do that if the goal of the US led conspiracy (which presumably involves the U.S. State Department) is to paint these groups as heroes? The claims are internally inconsistent and self-refuting.

> USA spearheading propaganda efforts

More DARVO. The US has been trying to respond to Russian propaganda efforts. What Putin is doing is out of Hilter's propaganda playbook for Sudetenland and Poland. If you knew anything about Putin's election interference in 2016, and about how Xi and Putin are weaponizing social media against the US population, and about the Kremlin's propaganda campaign to portray Ukraine as a fascist threat so as to have a justification for the invasion, you would perhaps not automatically assume such a cynical position. That doesn't mean that such efforts haven't sometimes failed, of course, in fact I'd be surprised if they had a perfect track record. But failures and mistakes don't mean that anti-propaganda efforts are themselves concerted propaganda.

> 1) they failed

This is a variation of the No True Scotsman fallacy. No evidence to the contrary is deemed sufficient because the conspiracy theory is this amorphous thing that has to be true regardless of how well it is falsified by counterexamples.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/ukraine-has-nazi-probl...

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/29/europe/ukraine-azov-movem...

> Unrelated, they were an organization that existed long before Russia's invasion

More DARVO. They were nascent at best and had no institutional acknowledgement (and let's not forget that pre-Maidan was a pro-Russian government, so to the extent that Azov was a thing pre-2014, the blame for that goes on their shoulders). Then Russia invaded, and that forced a change in the status quo out of necessity and made eliminating far-right paramilitary groups pragmatically infeasible. Ukraine doesn't have the luxury of picking and choosing who can fight to defend their small population.

> I'm not going to take the time to prove that right now.

If someone alleges a conspiracy theory and doesn't present compelling evidence, it can be safely dismissed.

[heartbreak]

You just described the early-Covid shutdown policy-making too.

[chaosite]

Shutdowns weren't done by media figures, they were done by policy-makers inside governments.

[heartbreak]

> That was just decentralized [governments] deciding to copy each other's opinions, because there's safety in numbers and group think, and because dissent sticks out and gets attacked.

Sorry, I thought that substitution was implied.

[yonaguska]

And "consent" to shutdowns were manufactured by policy makers inside governments paying media companies to promote their policies. It was a concerted effort.